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Japan decided to build Unit 731 in Manchuria because the occupation not only gave the Japanese an advantage of separating the research station from their island, but also gave them access to as many Chinese individuals as they wanted for use as human experimental subjects.[11] They viewed the Chinese as no cost research subjects, and hoped that they could use this advantage to lead the world in biological warfare.[11] The majority of research subjects were Chinese, but many were of different nationalities.
In 1932 the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Manchuria following the Manchurian Incident. The subsequent occupation of Manchuria provided an environment conducive to Ishii's research as human test subjects "could be plucked from the streets like rats."[4] Ishii relocated his laboratory to a military facility near Harbin. However, the facility's highly populated surroundings threatened to compromise the secrecy of the ongoing human experimentation.[5] Consequently, a second site, about 100 kilometers to the south of Harbin at the village of Beiyinhe, was selected. Beiyinhe was a diffuse village of about 300 homes known to the local populace as Zhong Ma City. The Imperial Japanese Army cleared out the local inhabitants and burnt down the village, except for a large building suitable for use as a headquarters.
Begun in 1937, Unit 731, located in Harbin, China, was created with legitimate intentions by the Japanese government. Started as an agency to promote public health, Unit 731 was meant to conduct research that would benefit Japanese soldiers, such as learning more about the ways in which the human body can withstand hunger and thirst and fight diseases. Early experiments were conducted on volunteers who had signed consent waivers, giving personnel permission. However, as the war intensified, they changed their methods.
Unit 731 was set up in 1938 in Japanese-occupied China with the aim of developing biological weapons. It also operated a secret research and experimental school in Shinjuku, central Tokyo. Its head was Lieutenant Shiro Ishii.
The Togo Unit employed gruesome tactics to secure specimens of select body organs. If Ishii or one of his co-workers wished to do research on the human brain, then they would order the guards to find them a useful sample. A prisoner would be taken from his cell. Guards would hold him while another guard would smash the victim's head open with an ax. His brain would be extracted off to the pathologist, and then to the crematorium for the usual disposal....
Prisoners were injected with diseases, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied.
To determine the best course of treatment for varying degrees of shrapnel wounds sustained on the field by Japanese Soldiers, Chinese prisoners were exposed to direct bomb blasts. They were strapped, unprotected, to wooden planks that were staked into the ground at increasing distances around a bomb that was then detonated. It was surgery for most, autopsies for the rest.
In other tests, subjects were deprived of food and water to determine the amount of time until death; placed into low-pressure chambers until their eyes popped from the sockets; experimented upon to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival; hung upside down until death; crushed with heavy objects; electrocuted; dehydrated with hot fans;[50] placed into centrifuges and spun until death; injected with animal blood, notably with horse blood; exposed to lethal doses of X-rays; subjected to various chemical weapons inside gas chambers; injected with seawater; and burned or buried alive.[51][52] In addition to chemical agents, the properties of many different toxins were also investigated by the Unit. To name a few, prisoners were exposed to tetrodotoxin (pufferfish or fugu venom), heroin, Korean bindweed, bactal, and castor-oil seeds (ricin).[53][54] Massive amounts of blood were drained from some prisoners in order to study the effects of blood loss
Some of the tests have been described as "psychopathically sadistic, with no conceivable military application". For example, one experiment documented the time it took for three-day-old babies to freeze to death
In 2002, Changde, China, site of the plague flea bombing, held an "International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare", which estimated that the number of people slaughtered by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and other human experiments was around 580,000. The American historian Sheldon H. Harris states that over 200,000 died.
. The name for the operation came from the Japanese use of the code name PX for Pestis bacillus-infected fleas. In planning the operation, the navy partnered with Lieutenant-General Shirō Ishii of Unit 731, who had extensive experience on weaponizing pathogenic bacteria and human vulnerability to biological and chemical warfare
The plan for the attack involved Seiran aircraft launched by submarine aircraft carriers upon the West Coast of the United States—specifically, the cities of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The planes would spread weaponized bubonic plague, cholera, typhus, dengue fever, and other pathogens in a biological terror attack upon the population. The submarine crews would infect themselves and run ashore in a suicide mission
At the time of his arrival in Japan, he had no knowledge of what Unit 731 was. Until Sanders finally threatened the Japanese with bringing the Soviets into the picture, little information about biological warfare was being shared with the Americans. The Japanese wanted to avoid prosecution under the Soviet legal system, so, the morning after he made his threat, Sanders received a manuscript describing Japan's involvement in biological warfare. Sanders took this information to General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers...
MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese
However, imperial Japanese leaders responsible for some of the worst war crimes committed in WW2 were not punished. Due to the US government covering up some Japanese war crimes and classifying incriminating evidence, as well as blocking the prosecution access to key witnesses, the trials failed to bring imperial Japanese leaders responsible for Unit 731 to justice
Instead, Ishii and his team managed to negotiate and receive immunity in 1946 from Japanese war crimes prosecution before the Tokyo tribunal in exchange for their full disclosure. Although the Soviet authorities wished the prosecutions to take place, the United States objected after the reports of the investigating US microbiologists. Among these was Edwin Hill, the Chief of Fort Detrick, whose report stated that the information was "absolutely invaluable”; it "could never have been obtained in the United States because of scruples attached to experiments on humans" and "the information was obtained fairly cheaply."
Kitano was one of the founders of the Japanese pharmaceutical company and first commercial blood bank Green Cross, which was renamed Welfide in 1998 and which became part of Mitsubishi Pharma in 2001
In July, 2017, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma acquired Neuroderm for $1.1 billion.[9]
On 27 February 2020, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma was delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and is now described as a member of the Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Group
NeuroDerm is an Israel-based, wholly owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corporation which, in turn, has global presence in Japan, United States, and Europe.
On May 2, one of the ten questions asked by Chinese media to U.S. politicians was this:
“Fort Detrick Biological and Chemical Weapons Base is the largest biological and chemical weapons research center in the U.S. Army. A spate of cases of pneumonia or pneumonia-like illnesses followed shortly after the closure.
At almost the same time, there was an outbreak of H1N1 influenza in the United States; in October 2019, several U.S. agencies organized a pandemic drill code-named ‘Event201’; in December, the first person to contract new coronary pneumonia in Wuhan showed symptoms; and in February 2020, there was a global outbreak at multiple points. Are these events intrinsically related?”
Camp Detrick and the USBWL became the site of intensive biological warfare (BW) research using various pathogens. This research was originally overseen by pharmaceuticals executive George W. Merck
The third American scientist-investigator, Dr. Norbert H. Fell, a civilian employee of Camp Detrick, arrived in 1947. Fell was more knowledgeable than his two predecessors, whose reports had primed him to look out for deception. After testing Fell, Ishii’s group apparently decided to reveal that human experiments had, in fact, been conducted for biological weapons development.
Conclusions
Thompson in Germany decided that the war was over, that the Germans had done terrible things under the pressure of racism, national security, and wartime exigency, and that future scientists in other nations would be tempted to commit similar crimes unless people decisively spoke out. The American scientists and policymakers in Japan decided that a new war was being waged and that national security and wartime exigency justified exonerating the perpetrators of Unit 731 and covering up their crimes.
Updated the link and added a warning. Yea this is the movie, be warned.
originally posted by: datguy
a reply to: Ilikesecrets
Is this the one your referencing?
Men Behind the Sun
yup I was slow and you made the last post, thanks for the add
originally posted by: Ilikesecrets
a reply to: SpacespiderLook for the movie, it's older. It's pretty damn horrible scenes but it tells the story well. I won't get graphic, but it's horribly sad. I understand why China has issues with Japan.
originally posted by: Threadbare
Super well researched thread. One thing I would add is the claims that Ishii and other members of Unit 731 were used by the US to wage biological warfare during the Korean War.
Allegations that the United States military used biological weapons in the Korean War (June 1950 – July 1953) were raised by the governments of the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. The claims were first raised in 1951. The story was covered by the worldwide press and led to a highly publicized international investigation in 1952. Secretary of State Dean Acheson and other American and allied government officials denounced the allegations as a hoax. Subsequent scholars are split about the truth of the claims.
On 30 June 1950, soon after the outbreak of the Korean War, the US Defense Secretary George Marshall received the Report of the Committee on Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare and Recommendations, which advocated urgent development of a biological weapons program.[4] The biological weapons research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland was expanded, and a new one in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was developed.
We believe that this situation is the inevitable result of the United States policy of ,"
use in retaliation only." Such a policy has resulted in the assignment of low priorities
to the research, development, and production of chemical weapons. The security of the
United States demands that the policy of “use in retaliation only” be abandoned.
The Chinese soon became concerned when 13 Korean and 16 Chinese soldiers contracted cholera and the plague, while another 44 recently deceased were tested positive for meningitis.[10] Although the Chinese and the North Koreans did not know exactly how the soldiers contracted the diseases, the suspicions soon fell on the Americans.
When the International Red Cross and the World Health Organization ruled out biological warfare, the Chinese government denounced them as being biased by the influence of the US, and arranged an investigation by the Soviet-affiliated World Peace Council. The World Peace Council set up the "International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in China and Korea" (ISC). This commission had several distinguished scientists and doctors from France, Italy, Sweden, Brazil and Soviet Union, including renowned British biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham. The commission's findings included dozens of eyewitnesses, testimonies from doctors, medical samples from the deceased, bomb casings as well as four American Korean War prisoners who confirmed the US use of biological warfare. On 15 September 1952, the final report was signed, stating that the US was experimenting with biological weapons in Korea...
The commission placed credence on allegations that Ishii made two visits to South Korea in early 1952, and another one in March 1953.[8] The official consensus in China was that biological weapons created from an American-Japanese collaboration were used in the Korean episode.
On the Korean battlefield, four anti-bacteriological warfare research centers were soon set up, while about 5.8 million doses of vaccine and 200,000 gas masks were delivered to the front.[43] Within China, 66 quarantine stations were also set up along the Chinese borders, while about 5 million Chinese in Manchuria were inoculated.[42] The Chinese government also initiated the "Patriotic Health and Epidemic Prevention Campaign" and directed every citizen to kill flies, mosquitoes and fleas.
In 1986, Australian historian Gavan McCormack argued that the claim of US biological warfare use was "far from inherently implausible", pointing out that one of the POWs who confessed, Walker Mahurin, was in fact associated with Fort Detrick.
In 1989, a British study of Unit 731 strongly supported the theory of United States–Japanese biological warfare culpability in Korea.
In 1995, using available Chinese documents, historian Shu Guang Zhang of the University of Maryland[53] stated that there is little, if any information that currently exists on the Chinese side which explains how the Chinese scientists came up with the conclusion of US biological warfare during the disease outbreak in the spring of 1952
Published in Japan in 2001, the book Rikugun Noborito Kenkyujo no shinjitsu or The Truth About the Army Noborito Institute stated that members of Japan's Unit 731 also worked for the "chemical section" of a US clandestine unit hidden within Yokosuka Naval Base during the Korean War as well as on projects inside the United States from 1955 to 1959
GENEVA, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- Declassified files by the Central Intelligence Agency have proven that the United States applied Unit 731-inspired bioweapons during the Korean War, said U.S. author Jeffrey Kaye, who has called for establishing an international commission for further investigation.
"The handprint of Unit 731, which the United States and Japan both covered up, were all over this," Kaye said, adding that "the same people (in the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service) who had advocated and lobbied for the amnesty and the collaboration with (Head of Unit 731) Shiro Ishii and his cohorts, ended up later advocating biological warfare and were put in positions of responsibility in 1950-1951."
"Fort Detrick of course was and still is, at the center of U.S. biological warfare research. Back in the 1950s, they worked closely with the CIA as well, and there was something called the Special Operations Division within Fort Detrick that worked on making biological weapons," Kaye said.
Multiple Fort Detrick personnel working on a bioweapons program met a violent death shortly after the U.S. biowarfare campaign in the Korean War, with no details ever released from Army investigations into their deaths, Kaye said.
“I have spent quite a bit of time and effort investigating the various and multiple allegations of BW, CW and other atrocities brought forward by the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War. This includes collecting them, which is no simple matter, since most were intercepted and destroyed by US postal officials during the Korean War, and so are often absent or fragmentary in academic libraries.”
Napalm is a weaponized mixture of chemicals designed to create a highly flammable and gelatinous liquid. Detonation then occurs by various explosive compounds that ignite phosphorous...
Burning napalm rapidly de-oxygenates the surrounding environment causing asphyxiation...
Some types of napalm use polystyrene chemicals that convert to styrene, which is a neurotoxin and likely carcinogen.
Different tactical herbicides were used at different times during the war (Young, 2009). By far the most widely used herbicide was Agent Orange, followed by Agent White; other tactical herbicides that were used in Vietnam during the war include Agent Blue, Agent Purple, Agent Pink, and Agent Green.
originally posted by: datguy
“…making the first accusations of WMD's including Mustard gas, VX and Sarin among other chemical agents which still have not been found...